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Alexander Shelley is the incoming music director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra, photographed during a visit to Toronto on Wednesday February 25 2015.Chris Young/The Globe and Mail

Only connect. That motto from E.M. Forster's novel Howards End could be the slogan for Alexander Shelley's first season as music director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra, if not his entire career.

The energetic Englishman's conversation, during a short visit to Toronto, is full of the language of linkage and cross-reference. Just about everything good can be made better, in his view, if the connections between things, people and ideas are stronger.

"My conducting teacher taught me something very useful," he says. "He said that if things are not working, it's very likely your fault. You haven't connected with the orchestra in the right way."

Likewise, if classical music isn't reaching parts of the population, he says, it's because those who perform aren't doing enough to make links between the music, its history and the way we live today. "I only really connect to a piece of music when I read around it, I mean the broad social context."

Connecting dots is a familiar theme in the arts and in arts promotion these days, but Shelley is quite willing to chase it into the corners, as they say in hockey. When he wanted to know more about Richard Wagner's intellectual climate, he dug into the philosophy of Schopenhauer, then skated after some of the eastern thinkers who had influenced the German.

"Schopenhauer's discussion about the link between phenomena and noumena – the world beyond – is about where music is, where the two meet," Shelley says. "That's why music fascinated him, and why Schopenhauer inspired Wagner."

Does he plan to talk to his audience in Ottawa about noumena when the NACO does a program around Wagner's Tristan und Isolde next year? "Absolutely. Of course."

Shelley, who at 35 looks lithe and chic in his skinny grey suit, is being presented in Ottawa as a kind of whiz-kid glamour boy. He may, in fact, be the most bookish leader the NACO has ever had.

In many ways, he's the antithesis of the outgoing Pinchas Zukerman, who isn't known for intellectual curiosity. Zukerman's preferences and aversions seem to haunt our conversation even when his name isn't mentioned.

The one time it is, in fact, is when Shelley praises "the wonderful string sound that Pinchas has developed" at the NACO – only to point out its strict limitations. "For me, that sound is applicable to music from Brahms through the later German romantics, some but not all Tchaikovsky, and that sort of genre." For everything else – French and Baroque music, Mozart and Beethoven, Schumann and most things modern – he'd prefer a varied but generally leaner and more incisive sound from what he calls "the orchestral mixing board."

"On every program that I perform this season, there will be one piece the orchestra has never done before," Shelley says, "and that will continue into the future." Again, there's a strong contrast with Zukerman, who disliked learning new repertoire and sometimes went out of his way to avoid performing pieces he had supposedly commissioned. Zukerman would be "happy conducting little else besides Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms," writes Maclean's journalist Paul Wells, who was on the search committee that chose Shelley.

Shelley is a product of the Westminster School, an ancient and elite London academy housed in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey. Its graduates include John Dryden, Christopher Wren and Edward Gibbon, as well as such eminent musicians as Henry Purcell, Roger Norrington and Ian Bostridge. Shelley sang in the school choir, played as cello soloist with the orchestra, and even conducted pieces by Haydn and Mozart, at the age of 14. But for him, the most important thing about the place was that the teaching "was very much about learning how to learn."

After a year at the Royal College of Music – the same school attended by his father, the pianist and conductor Howard Shelley – the young cellist left to join a new teacher in Dusseldorf. He stayed in Germany for nine years, completing two degrees as a cellist and another as a conductor. He was still studying when his mother, who also had a career as a concert pianist, suggested he try out for the Leeds Conductors Competition in 2005. He did, and won, and was soon making debuts with major British orchestras – "a trial by fire" for someone who had never previously conducted a professional orchestra.

He has been chief conductor since 2009 of the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra, where he gets a lavish 24 hours of rehearsal for each program. He's also principal associate conductor of the Royal Philharmonic in London, where he's lucky to get six. "The skill set required in London is much more non-verbal, much more reliant on hand gesture and trust, knowing what will come together in a concert and what won't."

The NACO is a nice compromise: The players sight-read well, as in London, and there's reasonable time for rehearsal, as in Nuremberg.

One of the showpieces of Shelley's first season is a five-concert series devoted to the 1920s, with an emphasis on the extreme stylistic variety, classical and not, of the music of that go-go decade.

"I'm very interested in the connectivity of music of the 20th and 21st centuries, of all styles, including pop music, jazz, rap and dance music," he says. It's not impossible that he may play some piano jazz after one of those shows, as he has done after some concerts in Europe.

Shelley's Tristan program matches Dutch composer Henk de Vlieger's 60-minute arrangement of themes from the opera with Der Gerettete Alberich, American composer Christopher

Rouse's creative speculation about what happens to Wagner's character Alberich after the end of the Ring cycle. Another program combines a new setting by Alberta-born Zosha di Castri of a text adapted from an Alice Munro reminiscence of childhood, with Mahler's Symphony No. 4, whose last movement also touches on the experiences of youth. John Estacio's I Lost My Talk, on another program with music by Shostakovich and Korngold, is a setting of a poem by Mi'kmaw elder Rita Joe, whose work Shelley discovered while reading up extensively on the country of his newest gig.

The season as published this week is a work in progress, he says. "There are some big things coming in the rest of the season that have yet to be announced," he says. "We're also working on a longer-term project, for which we are talking with a lot of the very diverse creative voices in the country."

When I ask for more details, he grins conspiratorially, obviously dying to say but not daring to yet. He's got lots to tell, this Mr. Shelley, and much to show as well, during his first year with the NACO.

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